GPU Compute Benchmarking

For my CIS 565 final project, I plan on developing benchmarks to compare compute performance of AMD Radeon HD 69xx series and the NVIDIA Fermi series of GPUs. I think this will be useful to the community, especially since these are the latest and greatest cards on the market. Both GPU families have very different architectures, so it'll be interesting to see where each card shines. I have a hunch that the AMD card could win at high ILP and arithmetic intensity workloads, but with NVIDIA's huge push on GPU compute, their Fermi line has the potential to sweep the test cases.

Soon, I'll have to start picking out those test cases. If anyone has any suggestions or things they'd like to see, please post away in the comments. In the meanwhile, my full gory project proposal is linked here.

Starting it off

Hi all, I'm going to position this blog as a place where I post updates on the projects I'm working on (and want to post updates on). The project I'm starting now is for my course on GPU Programming and Architecture, CIS 565.

Before I kick off a stream of updates on that, though, I figured I should link to a blog on a different project of mine, one year ago. Back in the day we built a wireless accelerometer-driven car with plenty of other features. Check out the above link to see some YouTube videos of it in action.  Moving from developing for 2MHz microcontrollers to monsters like the NVIDIA Fermi has definitely been interesting so far...